Plan With Me: March 2022 (Online Business Owner)

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Let’s plan a super successful month together! 💛

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Transcription:

Hey friends! Welcome to my second monthly “Plan with Me” for the business owner. In this series, I take you behind the scenes of a business owner (me) and show you exactly how I'm planning and bringing big projects to life. I’m also sharing the biggest takeaways with you so that you can plan a successful month as well. If you're new here: Hi! I'm Louise 👋 If you love all things online business, goal setting and planning, definitely hit subscribe. 

Reflecting on Progress as a Business Owner

Before we can move on to Planning, we first have to reflect on the month that just passed and see what big lessons we can learn from it. There's three things that you can ask yourself: 

What progress did you make towards your biggest goals? 

So often we feel like we're not making any progress at all, but if you actually look back at the entire month, you will see that you took some big steps forward. And if you didn't, let's figure out why not! 🤔 That brings us to the second question: 

What didn't go well? 

This is also really important to reflect on, because then we can move on to our third question: 

What can you do differently in the month ahead to ensure that you have a better month? 

Let's do some reflecting: what did I accomplish this past month? One thing that we do do in Asana (which is my favorite project management system! 🙌 If you've been here already before, you know this), is actually reflect on our week every single week. It is such a fantastic practice to work into your business, because otherwise it is so easy to forget. 😬 As a business owner, I would highly encourage adding in a recurring task for you to go in and track your week and just write down some notes for yourself on how that week went. 

Luckily (because I do this), I was able to look back and see the entire month in full. And if you have a team, a really great practice is to have your team members do this as well. It's not just me, it's everyone on the team. We reflect on very similar questions. We ask what went well this week, what didn't go so well, and what to talk about on our next team meeting. That really helps move things forward.

Behind the Scenes

So now let's reflect: what did we actually get done? First, we hired a new Facebook ads manager and SEO assistant to help with our list growth goal, which is fantastic! I'm really excited about that. 🤩 Getting some new energy into the business, and therefore new strategies as well. Then we mapped out our entire launch system and created a new live workshop funnel, which is exciting. Then we mapped out our entire launch system and created a new live workshop funnel start to finish and all the moving pieces. That was a huge accomplishment! We also made lots of progress on the new Uplevel with Asana (which is my signature online business owner course), and I'm very excited to share all those improvements with everyone.

With that being said, I still have so much that I need to do. 🛣 I'm going to have a very busy this month finishing this project up. Next, we held a price increase campaign, which went really well. On top of this, I have a lot of ongoing work with my clients for 90-Day Growth Strategy, which is my high-touch group coaching program for the business owner. So tons of progress! I am happy about that. 😊 

Identifying Opportunities

The second question is what didn't go so well? In this category, I'm actually going to start with huge, great news: which is we bought a house! 🎉🥳 It honestly has been top of my vision board for so long now (honestly, years! It’s, like, always been the top). And so every year, I just kept adding it to the vision board and this year it finally happened. So, so, so excited. 🏖 It is on the beach, which just feels absolutely unreal. I am so grateful. I've been so lucky in my life in so many ways to even allow this to happen.

Because of this, there was so much moving around and I did find this really challenging. I was trying to move all these projects forward while also completely move house. Somehow we accumulated a lot of stuff 📦 since being here for the past two years in Panama. We had a lot of things to move, and the new house didn't have much furniture left in it. We had to go out shopping and find all the things. It was really challenging to do all of that while also keeping up with content as much as I would like.

Business Owners are Humans, Too!

A few times this month I was feeling stressed out, and felt like I wasn't achieving my goals. It was so hard to move all day, then come up with an idea for a Reel or video.  So that didn't go so well! 🤷‍♀️ We still managed to post a lot, so it's absolutely fine. That is going to happen as a business owner. It is not always going to be perfect. When it comes to something like content and creativity is required, you're not necessarily going to be able to do it all the time. And that's okay as long as you keep moving forward and then try and pick it up the next month. Again, it's fine that it goes in waves, honestly. 🌊

Practical Application

Then the third question is: what can I do differently this month to have a more successful month? Here's what I'm going to do: I am going to pause ⏸ on the house. The house is now livable. We have everything we need. We are good to go. So, I need to pause. Of course, there's a long list of things that I would like to do in the future to make it feel even more like home, but we're good. 😎 I just need to pause on the house stuff, even though it's super fun (and I just want to spend all day on Pinterest 📌). 

The second thing I'm going to do is clear anything that is quick off of my to-do list. It's going to feel so much better to open up my Asana and see that I have all this space to work on my top project, which is the new version of Uplevel with Asana. That is my top number-one project for March, so it's really important that that gets as much time ⌚️ as possible. This is a really great trick, something that you can do as well. Go into your to-do list. Anything that's just been on there for too long and really won't take you too long to get done, just get it done. Then, you can go into the new month feeling like you have a clean slate.

Planning

Now moving on to the planning, you guys know that I love ❤️ to plan it out and have total clarity on what I'm going to do. Having those two things ahead of time before you start doing the work is going to help you so so much. Give it a try if that's not something that you usually do.

As I said for this month: my top priority is to complete the new Uplevel with Asana. That impacts all the rest of my big goals. The list growth system, the sales goals, the marketing goals; all of them stem from this core product being as good as it possibly can. I have to get this done.

Forgive Yourself

Because this is my top priority, I may need to show myself grace when it comes to content. That's going to be hard, considering that I feel like I didn't do as good of a job as I could this past month, but I just need to give myself grace and know that I can pick it back up at any time. As a business owner, if you are seeing yourself in this, just know that it is hard to juggle all the things in online business. There are so many to-dos and it really is a juggling act, 🤹‍♀️ and some things are going to need to take priority sometimes. And that's absolutely okay! 

Now that I know what I'm going to work on for this month, it's time to go into Asana and map it all out. It is not very helpful whenever you have a to-do that is so large (like create new version of Uplevel with Asana), that can very easily lead to overwhelm. 😵‍💫 I really don't like that to be what lands on my to-do list. I don’t know any business owner who does. Instead, I want to break it down into really easy bite-size pieces. Then, I know exactly what I'm going to do each day and how this is going to all fit together 🧩.

I'm going to really be breaking this down. For example, when I'm going to write each individual lesson, when I'm going to film them, when I'm going to upload them into the course area, all of that gets mapped out ahead of time. This makes it so much easier and is way more of a guarantee that it will get done. 

Wrap Up

That is how I do it! I hope that you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at running an online business for the business owner. If you have any questions at all. Let me know in the comments down below, 👇 Thank you so much for making it all the way to the end! If you want to know all of the other tools that I use to make my life as a business owner easier and more productive, click here. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure to do that and I'll see you real soon with another video. 👋